Chapter XIX: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (6)

What an impression was here made, never to be effaced! What a thing it is to be an author, and how much better a thing it is to be a reader, with all the pleasure and without any of the trouble—but without any of the fame, you will say. That is not worth two-pence. And yet true fame is something, the fame, for instance, of Cowper or of Thomson—not to live in the mouths of pedants, and coxcombs, and professional men, but in the heart and soul of every living being, to mingle with every thought, to beat in every pulse, to be hailed with transport by those who are young, and to be remembered with regret by those who are old, to be ‘first, last, and midst’ in the minds of others. True fame is like a Lapland sun, that never goes down; it rises with us in the morning, and rolls round and round till our night of life. Why, look here, what a thing it is to be an author! _John Gilpin_ delighted us when we were children, and were we to die to-morrow, the name of _John Gilpin_ would excite a momentary sense of pleasure. The same feeling of delight, with which at ten years old we read the story, makes us thirty years after go, laughing, to see the play. In all that time, the remembrance has been cherished at the heart, like the pulse that sustains our life. ‘That ligament, fine as it was, was never broken!’ and yet it was nearly broken the other night, in the after-piece of this name, and would have been quite so for the evening, if it had not been for Mr. Munden, who, as a subordinate agent, prevented Mr. Dowton from breaking his neck in the principal character. We differed from the audience on this occasion, who did not much relish Mr. Munden in his part of a cockney: we relished him altogether and mightily. His speech, his countenance, and his dress, were in high costume and keeping. There was a greatness of gusto about _Timothy Brittle_, _Mrs. Gilpin’s_ favourite but unfortunate son-in-law. It might be said of Mr. Munden in this character, that not only did his dress appear to have come fresh from the shop-board, his coat, his pantaloons, his waistcoat—but his speech was clipped and snipped as with a pair of sheers, and his face looked just as if the tailor’s goose had gone over it. It was a fine and inimitable piece of acting, but it was damned.—Dowton, in _The Rivals_, played _Mrs. Malaprop_, and Mrs. Sparks played _Sir Anthony Absolute_. We cannot say much of these transformations, for the performers themselves remained just the same, breeches and petticoats out of the question; nothing was transformed or ridiculous but their dress. Dowton was as blunt and bluff, and Mrs. Sparks was as keen, querulous, and scolding, as in any of their usual characters. The effect was flat after the first _entrée_, and the whole play was, in other respects, very poorly got up;—quite in the comic _negligé_ of _Drury-lane_.—We ought to say something of Mrs. Hill, who came out on Tuesday evening as _Lady Macbeth_. She is neither a good nor a bad actress. She has, however, a sentimental drawl in her voice and manner which is very little to our taste, and not at all in character as _Lady Macbeth_. The King never dies. Why should Mrs. Siddons ever die? Why, because Kings are fictions in law: Mrs. Siddons was one of nature’s greatest works.

DON GIOVANNI AND KEAN’S EUSTACE DE ST. PIERRE

_The Examiner._] [_May 18, 1817._

The last time we saw the Opera of _Don Giovanni_ was from a distant part of the house: we saw it the other evening near; and as the impression was somewhat different, we wish to correct one or two things in our former statement. Madame Fodor sings and acts the part of _Zerlina_ as charmingly as ever, but she does not _look_ it so well near as at a greater distance. She has too much _em bon point_, is too broad-set for the idea of a young and beautiful country girl: her mouth is laughing and good-natured, but does not answer to Spenser’s description of _Belphebe_,—and it cannot be concealed that _Zerlina_, the delightful Zerlina, has a cast in her eyes. Her singing, however, made us forget all these defects, and after the second line of _La ci darem_, we had quite recovered from our disappointment. On the whole, we at present prefer the air of _Vedrai Carino_, which she sings to _Masetto_ to comfort him, even to the duet with _Don Giovanni_. There was some uncertainty about _encoring_ her in this song,—not, we apprehend, because the audience were afraid of tiring the actress, but because they were tired themselves. Madame Fodor was _encored_ in all her songs throughout the piece.—This might be thought hard upon her; we dare say she would have thought it harder if she had not. Signor Ambrogetti’s acting as _Don Giovanni_ improves upon a nearer acquaintance. There is a softness approaching to effeminacy in the expression of his face, which accords well with the character, and an insinuating archness in his eye, which takes off from the violent effect of his action. The serenade of _Don Giovanni_ was omitted. As to Naldi, he is in too confirmed possession of the stage to be corrigible to advice. He is one of those old birds that are not to be caught with chaff. The sly rogue, _Leporello_, seems to have grown grey in the service of iniquity, and hangs his nose over the stage with a formidable _bravura_ aspect, as if he could suspend the orchestra from it. Angrisani is an admirable, and we might say, first-rate comic actor. He has fine features; a manly, rustic voice; and we never saw disdain, impatience, the resentment and relenting of the jealous lover, better expressed than in the scene between him and Madame Fodor, where she makes that affecting appeal to his forgiveness in the song of _Batte, Batte, Masetto_. It was inimitably acted on both sides.

DRURY-LANE.

Mr. Kean has appeared in _Eustace de St. Pierre_ in the _Surrender of Calais_. He has little to do in it; and he might as well not have appeared in the character, for he does not look well in it. He was badly dressed in a doublet of green baize, and in villainous yellow hose. It was like the player’s description of Hecuba—

‘A clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood: and for a robe
A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up.’

But we shall not, ‘though we have seen this, with tongue in venom steep’d, pronounce treason against fortune’s state,’ or against the Managers of Drury-lane. Mr. Kean shewed his usual talents in this part; but it afforded less scope and fewer opportunities for them than any part in which we have ever seen him. We are not sorry, however, that he has got into the part, as a kind of truce with tragedy. Why should he not, like other actors, sometimes have a part to walk through? Must we for ever be expecting from him, as if he were a little _Jupiter tonans_, ‘thunder, nothing but thunder?’ It is too much for any mortal to play _Othello_ and _Sir Giles_ in the same week—we mean, as Mr. Kean plays them. He is, we understand, to appear in a new character, and sing a new song, for his benefit to-morrow week.

CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY PEOPLE

_The Examiner._] [_July 18, 1819._

‘Here be truths.’—_Dogberry._

First, there is an old woman in the neighbouring village, fifty-six years old, with a wooden leg, who never saw a leg of mutton roasted, or a piece of beef put into the pot; and who regards any person who has not lived all his life on rusty bacon as a non-descript or ‘mountain foreigner.’ Yet this venerable matron, who now officiates as cook to a lady ‘retired from public haunts’ into a remote part of the country, kept her father’s house, who was a little farmer, for twenty years; so that she ranks, in the scale of rural existence, above her neighbours. What then must the notions of most of them be of the _savoir vivre_? Is this the sum and substance of all our boasts of the roast-beef of old England?—The truth is, that the people in this part of the country (I do not know how it is in others) have neither food nor cloathing wherewith to be content; nor are they content without them, nor with those that have them. Any one dressed in a plain broad-cloth coat is in their eyes a sophisticated character, as outlandish a figure as my _Lord Foppington_. A smock-frock, and shoes with hob-nails in them, are an indispensable part of country etiquette; and they hoot at or pelt any one, who is presumptuous enough to depart from this appropriate costume. This, if we may believe a philosophical poet of the present day, is the meaning of the phrase in Shakespear, ‘pelting villages,’ he having been once set upon in this manner by ‘a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,’ who disliked him for the fantastic strangeness of his appearance. Even their tailors (of whom you might expect better things) hate decency, and will spoil you a suit of clothes, rather than follow your directions. One of them, the little hunch-backed tailor of P—tt—n, with the handsome daughter, whose husband ran away from her and went to sea, was ordered to make a pair of brown or snuff-coloured breeches for my friend C—— L——;—instead of which the pragmatical old gentleman (having an opinion of his own) brought him home a pair of ‘lively Lincoln-green,’ in which I remember he rode in triumph in Johnny Tremain’s cross-country caravan through Newberry, and entered Oxford, ‘fearing no colours,’ the abstract idea of the jest of the thing prevailing in his mind (as it always does) over the sense of personal dignity.

If a stranger comes to live among country people, they have a bad opinion of him at first; and all he can do to overcome their dislike, only confirms them in it. It is in vain to attempt to conciliate them: the more you strive to persuade them that you mean them no harm, the more they are determined not to be convinced. They attribute any civility or kindness you shew them to a design to cajole them. They are not to be taken in by appearances. They are _feræ naturæ_, and not to be tamed by art. In proportion as you give them no cause of offence, they summon their whole stock of prejudice, impudence, and cunning, to aid their tottering opinion; and hate you the more for the injustice they seem to do you. They had rather you did them an injury that they might keep their original opinion of you. If there is the smallest circumstance or insinuation to your prejudice, their rancour against you, and self-complacency in their own sagacity, eagerly seizes hold of it; fans their suspicions into a flame, and breaks out into open insult and all the triumph of brutal derision. On the contrary, if they find you, after all, a quiet, inoffensive person, they think you a fool, and so have you that way. Used to contempt, they have not much respect to spare for other people. Finding themselves none the better for them, they have not much faith in your demonstrations of good-will towards them. Prepared for repulses and hard treatment, the expression of their gratitude is not very spontaneous or sincere.—An aged Sybil of this place, having gone to a lady, who had just settled here, with a doleful tale of distress, and an empty bottle, received a shilling instead of having her bottle replenished with liquor; when being met on her return by one of her gossips coming on the same errand, and being asked her success, she held up her empty bottle in sign of scorn, saying, ‘Look here!’ Such is the _beau ideal_ of unsophisticated human nature in her obscure retreats, about which there have been so many ‘songs of delight and rustical roundelays.’

Is it strange that these people who know nothing, hate all that they do not understand? Their rudeness, intolerance, and conceit, are in exact proportion to their ignorance: for as they never saw or scarcely heard of any thing out of their own village, every thing else appears to them odd and unaccountable, and they cannot suspect that their own notions are wrong, when they are totally unacquainted with any others. We naturally despise whatever baffles our comprehension, and dislike what contradicts our prejudices, till we are taught better by a liberal course of study; but these people are no better taught than fed. It is a rule which they act upon as self-evident, and from which you will not get them to flinch in a hurry—to scout every proceeding which differs from their own, and to consider every person, of whose birth, parentage, and education, they do not know the several particulars, as a suspicious character. They have no knowledge of literature or the fine arts; which, if once banished from the city and the court, would soon ‘be trampled in the mire under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ A mischievous wag of the present day undertook to read some pastoral and lyrical effusions, (remarkable for their simplicity) to a collection of Cumberland peasants, to see if they would recognise the sentiments put into their mouths; and they only (which was what he expected) laughed at him for his pains. ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and the free maids that weave their thread with bones,’ may indeed relieve the welcome pedlar of his wares, his laces, his true love-knots, or penny-Ballads, but they will have nothing to say to the Lyrical ballads, nor will the united counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, and Durham, subscribe to lighten the London warehouses of a single copy of the _Excursion_. The hewers of wood and drawers of water know nothing of poetry, and they hate the very look of a poet. They like a painter as little. An artist who was making a sketch of a fine old yew tree in a romantic situation, was asked by a _knowing hand_, if he could tell how many foot of timber it contained? _Falstaff_ asks as a question not to be answered—‘May I not take mine ease at mine inn?’ But this was in East-Cheap. I cannot do so in the country; for while I am writing this, I hear a fellow disputing in the kitchen, whether a person ought to live (as he expresses it) by pen and ink; and the landlord the other day (in order, I suppose, the better to prepare himself for such controversies) asked me if I had any object in reading through all those books which I had brought with me, meaning a few odd volumes of old plays and novels. The people born here cannot tell how an author gets his living or passes his time; and would fain hunt him out of the place as they do a strange dog, or as they formerly did a conjuror or a witch. Ask the first country clown you meet, if he ever heard of Shakespear or Newton, and he will stare in your face: and I remember our laughing a good deal at W——’s old Molly, who had never heard of the French Revolution, ten years after it happened. Oh worse than Gothic ignorance!

They have no books, nor ever feel the want of them. How indeed should they?[33] They have no works of poetry or fiction, to ‘fleet the golden time carelessly;’ but they do not therefore want for fabulous resources. Necessity is the mother of invention; and their talent for lying and scandal is nourished by the very lack of materials.[34] They live not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of their mouths. They are employed, like the Athenians of old, in hearing or telling some new thing. The draw-well is the source from which they pump up idle rumours, and the blacksmith’s shop is the place at which they forge the proofs, and turn them to shape, ‘giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’ They lie like devils through thick and thin. They tell and believe all incredible things; and the greater the improbability, the more readily and greedily is it swallowed, for it imposes more on the imagination. _To elevate and surprise_ is the great rule for producing a theatrical or pastoral effect. People in a state of nature believe any thing for want of something to divert the mind, as they plot mischief for want of better employment. Credulity and imposture are two of the strongest propensities of the human mind. Men are as prone to deceive themselves as others, without any other temptation than the exercise it affords to the imagination. It is a false test of historical evidence, that it is necessary to assign a motive why men should consent to be dupes or undertake to be cheats. Curiosity is the source of superstition; for we must have objects to occupy the attention, and fill up the craving void of knowledge; and in the absence of truth, falsehood is called in to supply its place, and with the gross and ignorant, supplies it much better. To ask why the untutored savage believes every marvellous story that is told him, in the dearth of all real knowledge, is to ask why he slakes his thirst at the first fountain that he meets, or devours the prey he has just taken. With all their tendency to bigotry and superstition, country people have scarcely any idea of religion. They have as little divine as human learning. The Bible is the only book they have, but that they do not read, except with spectacles, when they grow old and half-blind. They are to a man and woman of _Mrs. Quickly’s_ opinion—‘But I told him a’ should not think of God yet.’ They go to church, to be sure, as a matter of course, and from not knowing what else to do with themselves on Sundays; but they never think of what they hear, from one week’s end to another. Heaven and Hell are out-of-the-way places, not accessible to the apprehensions of those whose ideas cannot get beyond the parish where they were born; and their joys or sorrows indifferent to an imagination, taken up with the wants of the belly. An old woman, who lived in a cottage by herself, on hearing the account of the Crucifixion, said it was a sad thing, but she hoped it was not true, as it happened so far off and such a long time ago. A servant girl, hearing a Sermon read in which there was a striking account of the Resurrection and the Day of Judgment, was very much alarmed, and said she hoped it would not be in her time. The Decalogue has no terrors, and the Book of Revelations no charms for them. They will be damned, but they will steal and lie, and bear false witness against each other; or if they do not, it is the fear of being hanged, or whipped, or summoned before the Justice of the Peace, and not of being called to account in another world, that prevents them. They are of the earth, earthy. They take thought only for the morrow; or rather, conform to the text—‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ There is not a greater mistake, or a more wilful fallacy, than the common observation, that the lower orders are kept in order (and can only be so) by their faith in religion. They have no more belief in it practically than most of their betters, who propose to keep them in order by it, have speculatively. The ignorant and destitute are restrained from certain things by the fear of the law, or of what will be said of them by their neighbours; and as to other things which are denounced by Scripture, but to which no penalty attaches here, they think if they have a mind to do them, and chuse to go to hell for it, they have a right to do so. That is their phrase. It is nobody’s business but their own. It is (generally speaking) the absence of temptation or opportunity, and not an excess of religious apprehension, that keeps them within the pale of salvation. Their self-will balances their fear of the Devil, and when it comes to the push, the present motive turns the scale, and the flesh proves too hard for the spirit. Burns’s old man in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ must pass for a very poetical character, at least in this part of the country. We see constant accounts in the papers, in the case of malefactors that have come to an untimely end, that it was owing in the first instance to the want of religion, to the habit of swearing and Sabbath-breach. The same account would hold equally true of those who are not hanged: for if all but the godly and sober among the lower classes came to the gallows, the population would soon be thinned to a surprising degree.

‘’Twould thin the land
Such numbers to string on Tyburn tree.’

As to the regular church-going peasantry, there can be no great difference as to religious light and feelings between them and their forefathers in the time of Popery, when the service was performed in Latin, as it is at present in most foreign countries. The only religious people (except as a matter of outward shew and ceremony) are sectaries; for the instant religion becomes a subject for serious thought and private reflection, it produces differences of opinion, which branch out into as many speculative fancies and forms of worship, as there are differences of temper or accidents of education.[35] This, however, is the exception, not the rule, in the present state of things—now that zeal is no longer kindled at the fires of persecution, and that Acts of Uniformity no longer throw the whole country into a ferment of opposition. The missionaries and fanatics sometimes indeed set up a methodist chapel, where the staid inhabitants go in an evening to spite the parson of the parish, or to while away an hour or so; or perhaps a melancholy mechanic has a serious call and holds forth, or a pining spinster, moved by the spirit to listen to him—

‘Anon as patient as the female dove,
The whilst her golden couplets are disclos’d,
Awhile sits drooping:’

but the younger and healthier sort make a sport of it as of any other fantastical innovation; throw owls and skeletons of kites and carrion crows into the place of worship; and make a violent noise all the time the parson is preaching, to drown the nasal twang of evangelical glad-tidings, and the comfortable groans of the faithful.—All this while there is no end of the bastard-getting and swearing: and a girl, after having had three or four children by the same man, or by different men (as it happens), and who is as big as she can tumble again, is at length asked in church, without much scandal or offence to the community. It is a new topic for the village, and is excused on that account. It is, besides, an evidence quashed; and whatever others may take it into their heads to do, she need not talk. Liberality flourishes; a good example is set; and the species is propagated with as little trouble and formality as possible. The parson gets something by the christening, and the apothecary has a finger in the pie. This is a state of things which ought to be reformed—but how or when?

MR. MACREADY’S MACBETH.

_The Examiner._] [_June 25, 1820._

Mr. Macready’s _Macbeth_, which he had for his benefit, and which he has played once or twice since, is a judicious and spirited performance. But we are not in the number of those who think it his finest character. Sensibility, not imagination, is his _forte_. Natural expression, human feeling, seems to woo him like a bride; but the _ideal_ and preternatural beckon him only at a distance and mock his embraces. He sees no dim, portentous visions in his mind’s eye; his acting has no shadowy landscape back-ground to surround it; he is not waited on by spirits of the deep or of the air; neither fate nor metaphysical aid are in league with him; he is prompter to himself, and treads within the circle of the human heart. The machinery in _Macbeth_ is so far lost upon him: there is no secret correspondence between him and the Weird Sisters. The poet has put a fruitless sceptre in his hand,—a curtain is between him and the ‘air-drawn dagger with its gouts of blood’; he does not cower under the traditions of the age, or startle at ‘thick-coming fancies.’ He is more like a man debating the reality, or questioning the power of the grotesque and unimaginable forms that hover round him, than one hurried away by his credulous hopes, or shrinking from intolerable fears. There is not a weight of superstitious terror loading the atmosphere and hanging over the stage when Mr. Macready plays the part. He has cast the cumbrous slough of Gothic tragedy, and comes out a mere modern, agitated by common means and intelligible motives. The preternatural agency is no more than an accompaniment, the pretended occasion, not the indispensable and all-powerful cause. It appears to us then, that this excellent and able actor, _struck short_ of the higher and imaginative part of the character, and consequently was deficient in the human passion, which is the mighty appendage to it. We thought Mr. Macready in a manner conscious of this want of entire possession of the character. He was looking out for new readings, transposing attitudes and stage effects, trying substitutes and experiments, studying passages instead of reciting them, rehearsing _Macbeth_, not _being_ it. His performance of it was critical and fastidious: you would say that he was considering how he should act the part, so as to avoid certain errors or produce certain effects—not that he ever flung himself into the subject, and swam to shore, safe from carping objection, and above the reach of all praise. Mr. Macready does not often imitate other actors, but he endeavours not to imitate them, and that’s almost as bad. He should think of nothing but his part, and rely on nothing but his own powers. Singularity is not excellence. If to follow in the track of others shews a servile genius and pitiful ambition, neither is it right to go out of the strait road merely because others travel in it—‘but still to follow nature is the rule’—John Kemble was the best _Macbeth_ (upon the whole) that we have seen. There was a stiff, horror-stricken stateliness in his person and manner, like a man bearing up against supernal influences; and a bewildered distraction, a perplexity and at the same time a rigidity of purpose, like one who had been stunned by a blow from fate. Mr. Kean is great only in one scene, that after the murder of _Duncan_; his acting also consists only in the direct embodying of human passion, and is entirely ‘docked and curtailed’ of the sweeping train of poetical imagination. On the evening we saw Mr. Macready’s _Macbeth_ Mrs. Faucit played _Lady Macbeth_, and acted up to that arduous part with great spirit and self-possession; and Mr. Terry was the representative of _Macduff_. The only fault of this gentleman’s acting is its slowness. The words fall from his lips, like pendent drops from icicles. A speech, as he gives it, is equal to ‘twa lang Scotch miles.’ This not only causes a stagnation and heaviness in the sentiments, but often cuts the sense in two. Thus in the exclamation which _Macduff_ utters on hearing of the slaughter of his children, ‘Oh Hell-Kite, all?’ Mr. Terry paused at the hyphen, as if to take time to think, and by this means made it like an apostrophe to ‘Hell,’ adding the other syllable of the word, which determined the meaning and direction of his thoughts, afterwards. Mr. Egerton as usual played _Banquo_, and makes as solid a Ghost as we would wish to encounter of a winter’s eve.

David Rizzio we have not been able to get a peep at: but a friend whispered us that it was poor, and we see it is praised in the _New Times_!

On Friday Miss Stephens had a bumper for her benefit. The entertainments were the _Lord of the Manor_, a Concert, and the _Libertine_. In the first, Mr. Duruset from indisposition, and after making one feeble effort, omitted the songs, by the indulgence of the audience; after that, we do not see why he should be required to go through the rest of the part, for he has not ‘a speaking face.’ Jones’s _Mr. Contrast_ is a striking, fulsome fop. But he makes foppery not only an object of laughter, but of disgust; and perhaps this is going beyond the mark intended. We would recommend to our readers to go and see Mr. Liston’s _Moll Flagon_ by all means. It is irresistible. We may say of it with the poet—

‘Let those laugh now who never laugh’d before,
And those who still have laugh’d now laugh the more.’

Mrs. Salmon’s singing in the Concert was ‘d’une pathétique à faire fendre les rochers,’—and Miss Stephens’s Echo song seemed sung by a Spirit or an enchantress. We were glad to hear it, for we have an attachment to Miss Stephens on account of ‘auld lang syne’ (we like old friendships better than new), and do not wish that little murmuring syren Miss Tree to wean us from our old and artless favourite.—Those were happy days when first Miss Stephens began to sing! When she came out in _Mandane_, in _Polly_, and in _Rosetta_ in _Love in a Village_! She came upon us by surprise, but it was to delight and charm us. There was a new sound in the air, like the voice of Spring; it was as if Music had become young again, and was resolved to try the power of her softest, simplest, sweetest notes. Love and Hope listened, as her clear, liquid throat poured its delicious warblings on the ear, and at the close of every strain, still called on Echo to prolong the sound. They were the sweetest notes we ever heard, and almost the last we ever heard with pleasure! For since then, other events not to be named lightly here, but ‘thoughts of which can never from the heart’—‘with other notes than to the Orphean lyre,’ have stopped our ears to the voice of the charmer. But since the voice of Liberty has risen once more in Spain, its grave and its birth place, and like a babbling hound has wakened the echos in Galicia, in the Asturias, in Castile and Leon, and Estremadura, why, we feel as if we ‘had three ears again’ and the heart to use them, and as if we could once more write with the same feelings (the tightness removed from the breast, and the pains smoothed from the brow) as we did when we gave the account of Miss Stephens’s first appearance in the _Beggar’s Opera_. Life might then indeed ‘know the return of spring,’—and end, as it began, with faith in human kind!—

GUY FAUX

_The Examiner._] [_November 11, 1821._

Guy Faux is made into the figure of a scare-crow, a fifth of November bugbear, in our history. Now that Mr. Hogg’s _Jacobite Relics_ have dissipated the remains of an undue horror at Popery, it may seem the time to undertake the defence of so illustrious a character, who has hitherto been the victim of party-prejudice and national spite. Guy Faux was a Popish Priest in the reign of James I., and for his unsuccessful attempt to set fire to the House of Lords, and blow up the English Monarchy, the Protestant Religion, and himself, at one stroke, has had the honour to be annually paraded through the streets, and burnt in effigy in every town and village in England from that time to this—that is, for the space of two hundred years and upwards. It is sometimes doubtful, indeed, from the coincidence of dates and other circumstances, whether this annual ceremony, accompanied as it is with the ringing of bells, the firing of guns, and the preaching of sermons, is intended more to revive the formidable memory of ‘poor Guy,’ or in celebration of the glorious landing of William III., who came to deliver us from Popery and Slavery a hundred years afterwards—two things which Mr. Hogg treats as mere _bagatelles_ in his _Jacobite Relics_, though they do not appear so in the History of England; and to which the same writer assures us, as an agreeable piece of court-news that the present Family are by no means averse in their hearts!

Guy Faux was a fanatic, but he was no hypocrite. He ranks among _good haters_. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but those of an infuriated and bigotted faith; but he was a true son of the Catholic Church, a martyr and a confessor, for all that. He who can prevail upon himself to devote his life for a cause, however we may condemn his opinions or abhor his actions, vouches at least for the honesty of his principles and the disinterestedness of his motives. He may be guilty of the worst practices, but he is capable of the greatest. He is no longer a slave, but free. The contempt of death is the beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gun-Powder Plot was, if you will, a fool, a madman, an assassin; call him what names you please: still he was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the Parliament and come off, scot-free, himself: he shewed that he valued his own life no more than theirs in such a cause—where the integrity of the Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at stake. He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice which he was about to achieve: he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire: he was the Church’s chosen servant and her blessed martyr. He comforted himself as ‘the best of cut-throats.’ How many wretches are there that would have undertaken to do what he intended for a sum of money, if they could have got off with impunity! How few are there who would have put themselves in Guy Faux’s situation to save the universe! Yet in the latter case we affect to be thrown into greater consternation than at the most unredeemed acts of villany, as if the absolute disinterestedness of the motive doubled the horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such examples are held up for imitation,) and they make a fearful outcry against the violation of every principle of morality, lest they too should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices—lest they in their turn should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty. _Charity begins at home_, is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is well, when an individual shrinks from the face of an enemy, and purchases his own safety by striking a blow in the dark: but how the charge of cowardly can be applied to the public assassin, who, in the very act of destroying another, lays down his life as a pledge and forfeit of his sincerity and boldness, I am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself, can no more be branded with cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning hundreds of helpless and unoffending victims to the flames or to the horrors of a living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again; the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his monarch, who enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building, under promise of strict faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it, making sport of the cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an instance of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His plea was keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy Faux’s too; but I am sure at least that the latter kept faith with himself: he was in earnest in his professions. _His_ was not gay, wanton, unfeeling depravity; he did not murder in sport; it was serious work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death, but not yet ripe for destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of the human understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will, without an equal. There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and ready to applaud the deed when done:—there was no one but our old fifth-of-November friend, who still flutters in rags and straw on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and unshaken faith prevailed over natural frailty. A man to undertake and contemplate with gloomy delight this desperate task, could not certainly in the first instance, be a man of tender sensibility, or over-liable to ‘the compunctious visitings of nature’; but he would so far only be on a level with many others, and he would be distinguished from them by a high principle of enthusiasm, and a disinterested zeal for truth. Greater love than this has no one, that he shall give up his life for the truth. We have no Guy Fauxes now:—not that we have not numbers in whom ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ We talk indeed of flinging the keys of the House of Commons into the Thames, by way of a little unmeaning splutter, and a little courting of popularity and persecution; but to fling ourselves into the gap, and blow up the system and our own bodies to atoms at once, upon an abstract principle of right, does not suit the _radical_ scepticism of the age!

I like the spirit of martyrdom, I confess: I envy an age that had virtue enough in it to produce the mischievous fanaticism of a Guy Faux. A man’s marching up to a masked-battery for the sake of company, is nothing: but a man’s going resolutely to the stake rather than surrender his opinion, is a serious matter. It shews that in the public mind and feeling there is something better than life; that there is a belief of something in the universe and the order of nature, to which it is worth while to sacrifice this poor brief span of existence. To have an object always in view dearer to one than one’s-self, to cling to a principle in contempt of danger, of interest, of the opinion of the world,—this is the true _ideal_, the high and heroic state of man. It is in fact to have a standard of absolute and implicit faith in the mind, that admits neither of compromise, degree, nor exception. The path of duty is one, the grounds of encouragement are fixed and invariable. Perhaps it is hardly possible to have such a standard, but where the certain prospect of another world absolves us from a miserly compact with this, and the contemplation of infinity forms an habitual counterpoise to the illusions of time and sense. An object of the highest conceivable greatness leads to unmingled devotion: the belief in eternal truth embodies itself on practical principles of strict rectitude, or of obstinate, but noble-minded error.

There was an instance that happened a little before the time of Guy Faux, which, in a different way, has something of the same character, with a more pleasing conclusion. I mean the story of Margaret Lambrun; and as it is but little known, I shall here relate it as I find it:—

‘Margaret Lambrun was a Scotchwoman, and one of the retinue of Mary Queen of Scots; as was also her husband, who dying of grief for the tragical end of that princess, his wife took up a resolution of revenging the death of both upon Queen Elizabeth. For that purpose she put on a man’s habit; and assuming the name of Anthony Sparke, repaired to the Court of the Queen of England, always carrying with her a brace of pistols, one to kill Elizabeth, and the other to shoot herself, in order to avoid the hands of justice; but her design happened to miscarry by an accident, which saved the Queen’s life. One day, as she was pushing through the crowd to come up to her Majesty, who was then walking in her garden, she chanced to drop one of the pistols. This being seen by the guards, she was seized in order to be sent immediately to prison; but the Queen, not suspecting her to be one of her own sex, had a mind first to examine her. Accordingly, demanding her name, country, and quality, Margaret replied with an unmoved steadiness,—“Madam, though I appear in this habit, I am a woman; my name is Margaret Lambrun; I was several years in the service of Queen Mary, my mistress, whom you have so unjustly put to death; and by her death you have also caused that of my husband, who died of grief to see so innocent a queen perish so iniquitously. Now, as I had the greatest love and affection for both these persons, I resolved at the peril of my life to revenge their death by killing you, who are the cause of both.”—The Queen pardoned her, and granted her a safe conduct till she should be set upon the coast of France.’

Fanaticism expires with philosophy, and heroism with refinement. There can be no mixture of scepticism in the one, nor any distraction of interest in the other. That blind attachment to individuals or to principles, which is necessary to make us stake our all upon a single die, wears out with the progress of society. Sandt—(the last of that school)—was a religious fanatic—a reader of the book of Maccabees, a repeater of the story of Jael and Sisera, a chaunter of the song of Deborah. What lighted up the dungeon-gloom in which Guy Faux buried himself alive? The face of Heaven open to receive him. What cheered his undivided solitude? The full assembly of Just Men made perfect, the Glorious Company of Apostles, the Noble Army of Martyrs, the expecting Conclave of Sainted Popes, of Canonized Priests and Cardinals. What nerved his steady hand, and prepared it, with temperate, even pulse, to apply the fatal spark? The Hand of the Most High stretched out to meet him and to welcome him into the abodes of the blest—‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!’ In his face we see an anticipated triumph that ‘no dim doubts alloy’; he hears with no mortal ears the recording angels ‘quiring to the young-eyed cherubim’; a light flashes round him, a beatific vision, from the wings of the Shining Ones: he sits, wreathed and radiant, in the real presence! What need he fear what men can do unto him? To a hope like his, swallowed up in fruition, the shock that is soon to shatter his mortal frame plays harmless as the summer-lightning: the flames that threaten to envelope him are the wedding-garment of the Spouse. ‘This night thou shalt sup with me in Paradise’—rings in his sleepless ears. On this rock he builds his faith, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it!—Guy Faux (poor wretch!) was as sure within himself of the reward of his crime in the eternal salvation of his soul, as of his intention to commit it: he no more doubted of another world than he doubted of his own existence. A question whether his whole creed might not be a delusion had never once crossed his mind. How should it? He had never once heard it called in question. He believed in it as he believed in all he had ever seen or heard, or thought or felt, or been told by others—he believed in a future state as he believed in this, with his senses and his understanding, and with all his heart. Poor Guy—that miserable fifth-of-November scare-crow, that stuffed straw figure, flaunting its own periodical disgrace—never once dreamt (oh! glorious inheritance!) that he should die like a dog. Otherwise, James and his parliament would have been in no jeopardy from him. He was not a person of that refinement. He thought for certain that he would go to Heaven or Hell; and he played a bold, but (as he fancied) a sure game, for the former. With such objects at stake, and with his own blinded reason, and a stifled conscience, and implicit faith, and vowed obedience, and holy Mother Church on his side, and a fixed hatred of heresy and of all that belonged to it, as of a strange birth in nature, that made his flesh creep and his brain reel, and a disregard of his own person, as ‘dross compared to the glory hereafter to be revealed,’ he acted up to his belief: the man was what he preached to others to be—no better, no worse. Without this belief supporting him, what would he have been? Like the wretched straw figure, the automaton we see representing him, ‘disembowelled of his natural entrails, without a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom,’ a modern time-server, an unimpassioned slave, a canting Jesuit, a petty, cautious, meddling priest, a safe, underhand persecutor, an anonymous slanderer, a cringing sycophant, promoting his own interest by taking the bread out of honest mouths, a mercenary malignant coward, a Clerical Magistrate, a Quarterly Reviewer, a Member of the Constitutional Association, the concealed Editor of _Blackwood’s Magazine_!

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

_The Examiner._] [_November 18, 1821._

The diffusion of knowledge, of inquiry, of doubt (or what Lord Bacon calls ‘the infinite agitation of wit’) puts an end to ‘the soul of goodness’ that there is in bigotry and superstition, and should to its evil spirit at the same time. There is nothing so intolerable as the union (which we see so common in modern times) of religious hypocrisy with literary scepticism. The real bigot is a respectable as well as enviable character. Not so the affected one. Downright, rooted, rancorous prejudices are honest, hearty, wholesome things. They keep the mind _in breath_. Not so the whining, hollow, designing cant, which echoes without feeling them. The barbarous cruelties of savage tribes are partly atoned for by the keen appetite for revenge in which they originate: but we do not extend the same excuse to those who poison for hire. The fires of Smithfield were kindled by a zeal that burnt as bright and fierce as they. Our contemporaries who are in the habit of throwing firebrands and death, do it without malice; and laugh at those who do not understand the jest. The multiplication of sects dissipates and tames down the rage of martyrdom. The first grand defection indeed from an established and universal faith, creates a shock and is assailed with a violence proportioned to the firmness with which the parent-belief has been rooted in the public mind: but the subsequent ramification of different schisms and modes of faith from the first enormous heresy, tires out and neutralises the spirit of both persecution and fanaticism. Religious controversy is a war of words, and no longer a war of extermination. There may be the same heart-burnings, the same jealousies of difference of opinion; but they do not lead to the same fatal catastrophes or the same heroic sacrifices. We cannot burn or hang one another for differing from the Catholic faith as a crime of the most dreadful import, when hardly any two men can be found to agree in the interpretation of the same text. All opinions, by constant collision and attrition, become, if not equally probable, equally familiar. Men’s minds are slowly weaned from blind idolatrous bigotry and intolerant zeal, by the continually increasing number of points of controversy and the frequency of dispute. Then comes the general question as to the grounds and reasonableness of the doctrines of religion itself; and a sceptical, dispassionate, Epicurean work, like _Bayle’s Dictionary_ or _Hume’s Essays_, gives the finishing blow to what little remains of dogmatical faith in established systems. After that, a zealot is another name for an imposter. The reasons for belief may be as good or stronger than ever; but the belief itself, as it is more rational, is less gross and headstrong. The closest deductions of the understanding do not act like an instinct, or warrant a mortal antipathy; and let the philosophical believer’s convictions be what they will, he cannot affect an ignorance that it is possible for others to differ with him. A violent and overstrained affectation of Orthodoxy is, after a certain time, a sure sign of insincerity: the only zeal that can claim to be ‘according to knowledge,’ is refined, calm, and considerate. I do not speak of this sort of mitigated, sceptical, liberalised, enlightened belief, as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished:’ (in my own particular, I would rather have held opinion with Guy Faux, and have gone or sent others to the Devil for that opinion)—I speak of the common course of human affairs. I remember once observing to Wilkie, the celebrated artist, that Dr. Chalmers (his old friend and schoolfellow) had started an objection to the Christian religion, in order to have the credit of answering it. The Scottish Teniers said, that if the answer was a good one, he thought him right in bringing forward the objection. I did not think this remark savoured of the acuteness one would expect from such a man as Wilkie, and only said, I apprehended those opinions were the strongest which had been never called in question. _Reasoning is not believing_—whatever _seeing_ may be, according to the proverb.